


Close to the Sun

by JustCallMeEmrys



Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: BLACKWING - Freeform, Dirk was originally from Ireland and nobody can convince me otherwise, Friedkin needs to calm down, Gen, Icarus!Dirk, Some angst and hurt/comfort, he's not here yet but trust me he needs to calm his ass down, kidnapped Dirk, kidnapped Rowdy 3, post-Season 1, that will come up later I promise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-16
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-09-08 23:13:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8867161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustCallMeEmrys/pseuds/JustCallMeEmrys
Summary: Dirk should have known that BLACKWING was not going to just pack up and go home. He had been blinded by the light of his prospective future, and like Icarus, he had not noticed how close to the sun he really was. And now his wings are gone and he's falling, right back into the life that he had tried so hard to leave behind.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic on AO3, so I apologize if something is formatted incorrectly. Just lemme know and I'll do my best to fix it. This will quickly become AU once season two is released, but until then I'm going to enjoy playing (read: torturing) the characters.

  _'The universe will get me through. This isn't where I want to be, but it's where the universe wants me to go. The universe will get me through.'_

* * *

Agony. He was just a big bundle of nerves and noise, arranged in just the perfect way to express an unending pain. Whoever said that pain was mind-numbing had clearly never experienced it before, otherwise they would have known that no, it was  _not_ numbing, he could feel every little bit of it thank you very much.

 He didn't know how long the agony lasted, only that by the time he could register anything else aside from the fire and the screaming, he was quite convinced that every little bit of him had rotted away and gone off to find something better to do. The first thing that broke through was his name, spoken with the tone of a shout but muffled as if it was coming through a wall, or a pillow. Perhaps a wall of pillows.

 More fire was added to his agony, jabbing into him and hitting the last flesh that clung to his bones to sear it away. The pillows muffled the voices but not the burning pain. Or maybe the pillows had tried their best to defend him and, being the pillows that they were, had promptly caught on fire and simply collapsed on top of him. He appreciated their efforts, but cursed them all the same.

"Stop screaming!" the jabbing fire hissed, crackling and burning his ear with its hot breath. No, not in his ear; those had melted from his skull right around the same time his fingers--traitorous bastards--had jumped ship. That jabbing fire couldn't burn things that weren't there, so instead the heat snaked into his head, rifling through his skull and cooking his brain. The embers that spread the rot had just began to bite into his bones when the jabbing fire popped and hissed and spit and apologized, right before calling a comet from the heavens to ram into his head and speed the rot until he was nothing; just a smear of putrid flesh and blackened bone that had not the will to protest, nor the nerves to feel.

* * *

 When he next registered more than blissful darkness, the fire had gone, taking with it the rot and the agony, and he was whole once more. Not that he really wanted to be, especially when he moved and the last jagged edges of the pain stuck him with their pointy ends to remind him that it was still there, lingering and waiting and hungry to devour him again. Perhaps he would just never move again, and that feeling would not be able to find him. That sounded like a plan. He liked that plan.

"Todd!" a cry that had to have come from a megaphone wired directly into his brain rang out, which preceded an enveloping hug that pulled him forcefully upright. "Todd, what's happening?"

He would have liked to answer, but he didn't even know who was touching him at the moment. Long brown hair, pale skin, dark eyes, and a scent that straddled the line between lavender and snarky with just a hint of leather. Processing. "Amanda?" The arms tightened around him, and he assumed he had gotten it right. "What's going on?"

"No no no, you're supposed to have the answers," Amanda said, tone caught somewhere just shy of annoyed and right smack dab in the middle of panicked. That alone had him sitting up on his own power and looking around, ignoring the creeping sense of anxiety and confusion that was currently attempting to play double-dutch with his optical nerves. 

He was stretched out in the back of a car, one that he didn't recognize. Briefly wondering if he had been kidnapped again--as that was apparently his life now--he quickly dismissed that when he recognized the two other people by the open door, who were standing at a respectful distance but had the decency to look worried. One was Farah, naturally, her hand resting on the gun at her hip as if she expected to use it sometime soon. The other was one of the inaccurately-named "Rowdy 3". It was the youngest one--though he guessed that title now belonged to his own sister--who liked to mix bats and breakable objects. The other three were missing, and if that didn't clue him into the fact that something was terribly wrong, the fact that his sister had managed to remain at his side for so long without a hyperactive man-child shoving her out of the way definitely  _did._

"What's going on?" he repeated. "Where's Dirk?"

Farah shook her head. "I couldn't find him," she said. "He went outside while you were in the restroom, but when he didn't come back I looked outside and he wasn't there, and then I went to find you and you were on the floor in the restroom screaming and _Amanda_ was on the phone screaming and I-" her voice caught in her throat. "I don't know where he is." She gestured to Amanda. "I told Amanda what was happening with you, and she said to get you out of the diner and that she needed help once I was sure you were okay."

"Yeah," Amanda snapped, her panic momentarily replaced by her customary bite. She punched his arm, although the hit was lighter than it could have been. "You told me that you didn't have Pararibulitis!"

"I don't!" Todd said. "Or, I didn't. Look, That's not important right now." Although it certainly felt important. He basically had a psychological time bomb inside of his brain now, one that was lurking and waiting to go off and grab a minor stimulus to shank him with. But if Amanda could live with it, then he could as well; or, at the very least, put it on the back burner until everything else was sorted out. "When you called me you were yelling and...something about someone being there?" Honestly it was all a bit hazy; he could remember the confusion at seeing Amanda calling him considering she had all but cut ties with him, and the surge of panic when she had answered the phone with terrified, breathless screaming, but beyond that the details disappeared into a swell of fire.

Amanda bit her lip. "I didn't see anybody, but Martin..." she trailed off, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth again. "He told Vogle and me to run." she said, her voice low as her eyes darted back to the young anarchist, whose gaze was planted firmly on the asphalt between his feet. He was sans bat, which was strange unto itself, his fingers fiddling in a way that, initially, Todd had taken to be discomfort at not having a weapon. Or perhaps it was something like the shakes an addict got when in the throes of withdrawal, with Vogle's addiction of choice being breaking anything and everything in the loudest, most physical way possible. But Todd had seen people detoxing from heroin before; had witnessed what happened to people when they quit cold-turkey or just went too long without their fix. This wasn't that. This was a full-body trembling that was part fear and part adrenaline; one part was trying to keep him paralyzed, while the other was demanding that he _move_. Todd had never seen the Rowdy 3 as anything but a terrifying, destructive force that could outshine a hurricane in the middle of an earthquake. This was odd. It was unsettling.

"They got 'em," Vogle said, voice soft and shaking. "They got 'em. Martin and Gripps and Cross...came outta the grass and took 'em. Probably got your friend, too, since he's kinda like us."

Dirk getting kidnapped wasn't much of a surprise. He seemed to piss enough people off for that to be a regular occurrence. But this was different. It felt different.

"Shit," Amanda hissed, eyes wide. "Those guys? That old guy and the stupid one with the riot gear? The one that held a gun to my head?"

"What?!" Todd barked, heart leaping and flopping in his chest. He was promptly ignored.

"They were...what did you guys say they were?" Amanda snapped her fingers. "CIA or something?"

"CIA?" Todd parroted. Something Dirk had said at the beginning of it all a week ago came back to him.

_"No, I'm not with the CIA...anymore."_

Dirk had made other crack comments about the government after that, just short little snippets in a rapid conversation where they were quickly lost and forgotten under a pile of other things that were more important. Todd had thought that Dirk had been kidding since so much else that spewed from his mouth was utter crap--especially when, at one point, Dirk had immediately stated that his comment about himself and the CIA had been a lie--but at Vogle's nod, so much of that was flipped right on its head. Things made a bit more sense, too, but only in the way that things had been "making sense" since a yellow-jacketed idiot had climbed through his window.

"Project: BLACKWING," Vogle began, clearing his throat when his voice caught. "It was a...I dunno. I was added late. It was where I met the other Rowdies." He sniffed and wiped at his nose with the back of his hand. "There were others that were like us but weren't like us. Never got to meet any of them. We were kept separate from the other Codenames. I don't remember a lot 'cuz I was twelve, but sixteen years ago there was...I dunno, this big escape. I dunno how, but we got out, and I think a lot of other Codenames did, too. Maybe all of them. We couldn't go home 'cuz BLACKWING knew where we were all from, so I stuck with the other Rowdies." Vogle shook his head, one shaking hand coming up to pull nervously at his hair. "It's been nearly  _sixteen years,_ we thought they didn't care about us anymore. BLACKWING didn't really seem to be workin' the way they wanted, anyway. We were still just floatin' around 'cuz we were havin' fun doin' it and that's how we've lived, but then freakin'  _Riggins_ just...shows up again! He wanted us to go  _back!_ Asked us. We said no, and he sent a freakin' strike-team after us!" He sat down, right there in the middle of the street, and dropped his head into his hands. "And they took 'em and I dunno what to do now."

The cold grip of fear had wound its way around Todd's heart, freezing it and his throat and his lungs. "How likely is it that they took him?"

"If Martin could track 'im from half a state away, then there's no way they didn't know about 'im. And if Riggins is tryin' to round us all up again, then they got 'im, too." 

"Then we're going to get him back," Farah said with a decisive nod, as if just declaring it was going to make it so. "You said you could track him? Could you lead us to him?" 

Vogle shook his head rapidly, eyes wide. "I'm no good at tracking," he said. "Martin always does that part. I just hit stuff." He wasn't even allowed to drive the van. Probably because he didn't know how, but still.

"Look. Vogle, right? We have no idea where these assholes went. We have no idea where to start looking, and last time I tried to call one of my contacts in the government, it got me jammed in the trunk of a car with a body-switching jackass trying to shoot me." Not that calling any part of the government would help if it was the  _freaking CIA_ that they were going after. It was like trying to out-hack the NSA. "We are on our own. If we want Dirk and your friends back, then we've got to work with what we've got. You're the psychic vampire bloodhound guy, so will you at least try to track them?"

Vogle nodded after a moment of hesitation. "But we need to find a place to drop Amanda off first."

"What?" she snapped. "No way! I'm going to help you guys!"

"Martin told me to protect you," Vogle protested, setting his jaw and crossing his arms. Neither of those did him any good when Amanda leaned right into his personal space, a snarl twisting her mouth.

"Does it look like I need protecting?" she hissed. "Because from where I'm standing, it looks like I'm the only one that's got any of their shit together. So this is how it's going to go down: You're going to track Dirk and the other Rowdies, and then we are _all_ going to go find them, and I am personally going to kick the ever-living  _shit_ out of anybody that gets in my way, even if that person is you. Got it?"

For a moment, Vogle looked just as intimidated as Todd felt; twenty-seven years of being related to her let him know that her words were not a threat, but a very firm promise. One which she would deliver on with much glee, and without even a moment of hesitation. One she might still deliver on even if everything went her way, just for the hell of it. If Todd hadn't grown up in the same house as her, he would have sworn that she was raised by wolves, or at least some very violent hobos that could put fear into the hearts of everyone from Girl Scouts to energy vampires.

But then Vogle grinned, the expression all teeth and quite manic, and pulled Amanda into a tight hug. "I am so happy we adopted you."

Todd made a noise that was very offended, but that noise was drowned out by the sudden cacophony of gunfire. Farah drew her gun, Todd ducked his head behind one of the car seats, and both Vogle and Amanda hit the deck while trying to bodily cover the other. Not a single bullet hit them, nor anything near them; the sound was echoing from the other side of the grove of trees they were parked near, perhaps half a mile of woodlands to provide them cover. Whatever the guns were aiming at, it was probably not them. Not that they wanted to stay anywhere near what sounded like seventy assault rifles going off at once, their pace hastened when that gunfire was joined by what sounded like an honest-to-God  _cannon_ in the middle of the countryside. And then everything was deafened by an even louder explosion, which belched a cloud of flame and smoke high into the deceitfully cheerful sky. The noise that followed was just a roar of pained and panicked screams, and the report of noticeably fewer guns.

"Let's get out of here," Farah suggested.

Nobody had to be told twice.

* * *

 ' _Why does this always happen? Why can't I just make my own way for once? I'm not a dog on a lead. If life is a game, life chooses my moves for me. The universe gets me through, just to play the next level at its control. Always the avatar, never the player. I don't want to be a part of this game anymore. If I can't choose when I jump, then just let me fall.'_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm posting this chapter during my break at work so if there's any formatting issues, lemme know and I'll fix them as soon as I'm by my computer again.
> 
> Also in case you were confused, yes, the very beginning and very end of the chapters are snippets of Dirk's thoughts.

_'That's not how it works. I can't...I can't do what you want. Stop trying to make me. Stop. Stop! Please.'_

* * *

They spent one week in Seattle before basically evacuating, and in that time, they found absolutely nothing.

That wasn't quite correct, actually. Farah had four million dollars, and four million dollars could buy quite a few things. Like a horse, or a fighter jet, or a politician. None of which they bought. But they did get a nice cabin somewhere near Cedar Falls, so that was cool.

It was nice and secluded, kind of like the Spring House had been, just more enveloped by trees and undergrowth that would, in theory, keep them all well hidden from the CIA. Farah had insisted on covering just about every clear surface with camouflage netting and had done so practically overnight, tacking them to exterior walls and the roof, and throwing them over the car and the firewood.

"It'll keep the CIA from being able to spot us with satellites or patrols," she had reasoned. It also kept the rest of the group from being able to find the cabin whenever they left, which was an unwelcome bonus.

They had also gone back and found the Rowdy 3's van, which had been their first order of business at Vogle's behest. It, according to him, had "some of the best shit" in it, which translated to his beloved bat, a number of thick chains--"They're for swingin'!"--and the dismembered leg of a beaten-to-hell storefront mannequin. Everybody decided not to ask.

Whenever Farah wasn't finding new ways to try and keep the cabin secret, she was off with Vogle, driving in an ever-widening circle in an attempt to find a "scent" or whatever for him to follow. Together, they pooled their knowledge of the underhanded movements of government agencies to try and narrow down where BLACKWING may have gone. Unfortunately, Todd's knowledge of the CIA project consisted entirely of its name and that they wanted Dirk, so he was quickly eliminated from helping with their think tank.

Vogle wasn't too chatty about what BLACKWING was like, but he was willing enough to talk about where the original base had been: Northern Colorado, somewhere in the mountains and the trees, and away from civilian traffic. Farah knew that the likelihood of them returning to the same base--or even the same state--was incredibly thin. That left everywhere _but_ Colorado for them to search, the thought of which was enough for the group to all agree that strong drinks were in order.

Todd's sudden development of Pararibulitis was another hurdle that needed to be dealt with. An official diagnosis was deemed unneeded since it was pretty obvious that that was what it was. The only issue that they really had was the matter of medication, which was to say that Todd didn't have any. Vogle's ability to absorb the energy from his nerves and halt the attack was the best fix for that problem that they could afford at the moment. Not literally, since Farah could--and had offered to--order enough medicine to bury the house under a mountain of pills, but it was the type of drug that required a prescription, so getting their hands on that much Neurontin from a third party would probably get them put on a watch list. Watch lists and hiding from the CIA did not mix well, so medicine mailed from the Middle East was not going to happen. Luckily, Amanda had stockpiled enough of the stuff to last both of them for a while.

Another two weeks passed by without any progress. Four days into the fourth week, Farah and Vogle returned to the cabin late, the darkness of night and their extinguished headlights cloaking their approach. Sitting in the car with Farah while she careened through the pitch black forest at speeds that would have been excessive even if they were being tailed was, to put it simply, making Vogle consider just bailing and taking his chances. The relief he felt when Farah suddenly braked and announced that they were back at the cabin was immense, but nothing could outshine the giddiness that was practically spilling out of his ears. Normally he would express this particular emotion by hitting a number of things with blunt objects.

He settled for flipping an end table once he and Farah were safely inside the cabin, waking both Todd and Amanda, who had been dozing on the sofa in the living room.

Todd frowned, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. "Did it go that badly?" he inquired, shoulders falling both at the prospect of another day spent without anything to show for it, and at the end table that was now beyond help.

"No, that was a happy act of destruction. He found something," Amanda said with a grin, practically vibrating where she stood. "You did, didn't you?" Vogle nodded, and Amanda squealed.

"Oh. Good to know you break things regardless of what mood you're in," Todd muttered. He shook his head to get back on topic. "Wait, you found something? Did you find Dirk? Or the Rowdy 3?"

"It's just a scent," Vogle explained. "I dunno who it belongs to, but it's someone like us. It's pretty old." Dusty and gray and wrinkling. The kind of old that society shuffled away into a nursing home because it was considered unsightly, or was just unable to care for itself anymore. A dying scent. He was amazed he had even noticed it. "It's too old for me to follow, but we're gonna search the area better tomorrow."

"We're hoping to find something he can actually track," Farah added.

Vogle grinned like a wolf that had just found a warren of particularly incompetent rabbits, rubbing his hands together with a mad gleam in his eyes. "And then we're gonna find 'em and I'm gonna break Riggin's face."

The quartet was almost too thrilled to sleep that night, tossing and turning in their respective beds. Admittedly that was probably not a good idea on Vogle's part, considering his bed of choice had been a hammock made from a camouflage net strung between the rafters in the living room, even though there was a perfectly good bed right down the hall. He fell out of it every hour, which was a nice way for the others to tell when a socially acceptable amount of time had passed before they all tried to go and wake up the others.

While they usually stuck with two in the cabin at all times, none of them wanted to volunteer to be the ones to stay behind this time. Not when they had their first lead...well, ever. Vogle got a free pass because without him, the point of leaving was moot. The other three, however, wasted a truly impressive number of hours arguing and talking in circles--which somehow devolved into Vogle and Amanda competing to see who was the loudest when shouting absolute nonsense--and hiding the car keys from one another. Eventually they all piled into Farah's car and headed northwest, towards Fall City.

The drive was interesting, and one that Todd never wanted to repeat nor remember in his natural lifetime.

Fall City was smaller than its name implied, and completely inconspicuous. Unless you were Farah, in which case it was entirely suspicious. It looked nothing like the secret hideout of a dickish government agency, but that didn't stop her. She was paranoid, and quickly spread that feeling to the rest of the group with her near-nonsensical ramblings on how the town was just a bit _too_ quaint and seemed to be trying too hard to _not_ look like the daydream of a conspiracy theorist, and how one of the hitchhikers standing on a corner with his sign held upside-down was giving her the side-eye. Todd tried to reason that it was probably because they had passed him ten times in half as many minutes. Farah pointed out that, as a hitchhiker holding an inverted pizza box sign, he had no room to judge, and therefore was clearly a CIA informant. Vogle jumped onto that bandwagon much too quickly, dragging Amanda behind him, and leaving Todd in the dust to be the only one who he felt like had any sense.

On their second pass of the local Farmhouse Market, Vogle suddenly called for Farah to stop the car, but only after he had already opened the door and jumped right out, his shout fading quickly as he rolled across the asphalt towards the traffic that understandably had no idea how to deal with a man trying to climb up beneath their tires. By the time Farah had parked the car and made sure that the local cops weren't being called, he was already rifling through the dumpster behind the market, a laser-like focus in his eyes. His nostrils flared, he gagged at the smell of moldy boxes and spoiled food, and then he tipped himself forwards into the giant bin of trash. Two minutes of thumping later, and he popped his head back out.

"I've fought a flock of crows over the right to eat roadkill and slept in an uncleaned horse stall for a week, and even _I_ find this gross," he helpfully informed the others before diving back into the trash as if he was wading around a hot tub instead of a container of pantry rejects. He only returned once he had found what he was looking for, which was incredibly underwhelming; a nice red sport coat that had probably looked even nicer before somebody had decided to smear it with blood and mud and grease. Vogle still looked proud of himself as he clambered back out of the dumpster, prize in hand and a crooked grin on his face.

"You jumped out of a moving car for that?" Todd demanded.

Vogle shrugged. "We weren't goin' that fast," he said, as if that made it okay. And if he considered thirty-five miles per hour not too fast to be jumping out of a vehicle, then Todd was a bit worried to learn what speed he capped out at. "And this is important. I think." He sniffed to prove his point, drawing in air as if he was attempting to suck up all of the oxygen within a fifty-mile radius, all without breaking eye-contact with Todd in a move that was slightly and unreasonably intimidating.

Todd felt like throwing his hands in the air. Dirk didn't wear sport coats. He wore ties and dress shirts, and colorful leather jackets that should have been an eyesore but fit his personality enough that they weren't. And the sport coat looked too "business" and "customer service" for the Rowdy 3's "biker" and "threat to the public". Still, Todd wouldn't put it past any of them to don a sport coat if it meant getting away from BLACKWING, so he asked, "Is it Dirk's?" Vogle tossed his shoulders in a shrug. "One of the Rowdies'?" Another shrug. "Then why'd we stop? Why'd you think it was important?"

"Trackin' people through emotion energies ain't an exact science," Vogle growled. It wasn't a science at all, actually. Science didn't believe in vampires, psychic or otherwise. "I told you, Martin's the tracker. I can't find specific people like he can."

Martin was the oldest of the Rowdy 3 and had been with BLACKWING the longest, so maybe that was why he was so much better at tracking than others. He could find just about anybody that he wanted so long as he knew what the emotions surrounding them smelt like. He could sift through the clutter of emotions and energy in the air to pick out a very specific person just based on the tiny nuances between each strand of happiness or contempt. That was a gift that he alone had out of their group. The best the others could do was pick up on heightened emotional states and identify the feeling being experienced, which clued them in to where to get their next meal. Identifying just who the emotions belonged to was still a mystery to Vogle. If he lost the trail of whoever or whatever he was tracking, then he wouldn't even know if or when he came across it again.

"Then what's even the point of trying to track them?" Todd demanded. "We're wasting our time driving around and being useless!"

"Look, you shitty excuse for a hobbit, I said I can't track specific people. Identifyin' certain _kinds_ of people is different." At their uncomprehending looks--and Todd's vaguely insulted one--Vogle shook the sport coat out, raising his eyebrows so high they nearly merged with his hairline. "This smells like someone like me." The difference between normal people and people with some sort of psychic power was like comparing night and day. And this scent wasn't stale like the faint whiff he had detected the night before. This one was fresh; fresh enough that he felt like he had a chance of actually following this one.

Vogle shuffled in a circle in the parking lot of the market until he found where the scent wandered off to. That trail led them straight out of Fall City, which, along with the judgmental vagabond, Farah was happy to be putting firmly in her rear-view mirror.

Vogle wrapped himself up into a nice little burrito of destructive force with the blankets from the trunk, and then tucked himself into the back seat where he could try to keep a handle on the trail while staying out of sight of the street cameras. The path that they followed at his direction was convoluted, doubling back on itself multiple times and traveling in giant circles. He insisted that they were still on the right path, even when half of the group was sure that he was just screwing with them.

It was right around Monroe that he suddenly jackknifed at the waist, eyes wide. "HOLY _SHIT_!" he shouted over the startled yelps of the other three, ripping an arm free from his tangle of blankets to slap at the window at his right. "Go that way! Somethin' big just happened."

Something big had indeed happened. On the banks of the Skykomish River, it looked like someone had upended God's blender in the midst of making a smoothie out of strawberries and beet juice. Red was _everywhere_. Todd had watched an electric ghost shark rip people in half on no less than two occasions, and even he was having issues with the carnage laid out before him. The best theory he could come up with on the fly was that a knife tornado had been dropped into a crowd of _very_ unfortunate people. Two months ago he would have said that was impossible, but again; _electric ghost shark_. He had learned to reevaluate his concepts of reality.

Their residential psychic vampire was absolutely no help in identifying what had gone down. All he could give them was a running list of emotions that were floating up and down the bank, which was easy enough to take a stab at guessing without supernatural powers. He was able to confirm that the trail of the person with powers cut right through the swath of destruction and continued on, so at least they knew that their technical guide hadn't been caught in the sea of death that they had all stumbled in to. It was the only trail of emotions leading away from the scene, too, so returning to their original path wasn't too difficult.

Before leaving the bank, something caught Todd's eye, which made his stomach flip. One of the bodies had a shaven head, with tattoos that resembled circuitry trailing down the neck. It was another one of those body-swappers, one of the kinds that he had heard referred to as a drone. Looking to the other bodies--though not too close, because gross--a further four of the nine were also bald and with similar tattoos.

"There's more of these assholes?" Todd asked once he alerted the others to his discovery. "I thought you said that you and the Rowdy 3 took care of them."

"I said they were chased off. We didn't kill them," Amanda protested.

"Well, somebody clearly is now," Farah said with a broad wave of her hand.

Todd wondered just when he had come to accept the casual mention of people being murdered. He had technically killed some people himself, so he figured that it was right around then.

He also tried to find sympathy for the body-swappers, perhaps buried somewhere deep down, but considering that his interactions with them had culminated in him getting electrocuted no less than three times, kidnapped, and jerked like a rag doll through a time loop, he felt like they had gotten what they deserved.

Either way, Todd was very, _very_ determined to never meet the thing that had basically torn a gaggle of people to ribbons.

Though if the universe led Dirk where he needed to go, then Todd figured that it led him into places or situations that he had strictly stated he wanted to avoid. For at that exact moment, he realized that there was a bloody machete swinging directly towards his neck.

_'Bite me, universe!'_

* * *

' _You're wrong. I'm a good detective. They like me. They're my friends. You're wrong! YOU'RE WRONG!'_


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so sorry that this took so long to update! School started up again, and some GENIUS (me) decided that it would be a good idea to take a whole bunch of classes that are three hours long instead of the usual, like, fifty minutes. So burnout was a thing for a bit, but I've settled nicely. On the bright side, I've learned that I like to play with fingerprint powder, and that you should never look at college classrooms under a blacklight. 
> 
> Also I think this chapter is shorter than usual. Whoops. Not much seems to happen but trust me, there's important stuff in this chapter. Nudge nudge.

' _Please. I'm trying, all right? I'm bloody trying! Just leave them alone! Please. I'm trying.'_

* * *

 "Maybe you should take the machete off the table?" Todd suggested, keeping his tone as cordial as possible.

The owner of said weapon hardly looked up from her plate of french fries, which she was shoveling into her mouth nearly faster than she could swallow them. She had the decency to glance at the offending item. It was no longer soaked in blood and wrapped in viscera--an unfortunate patch of grass outside now played host to that unpleasantness--but it was still a machete sitting on the table in the middle of a very public diner. Good service does not come to those that brandish threatening weaponry. Probably.

"Why?" She had an odd sort of East Coast accent, with a voice like a chain-smoking alcoholic that gargled cigarette ashes between shots of lighter fluid.

"People are cautious of weapons that can, uh, hurt them." Normal people. Civilized people. Everybody _but_ the group he was with, because nobody else seemed bothered by the giant knife resting so closely to their cheeseburgers and turkey clubs. Vogle actually looked jealous of the woman's weapon. Maybe he and his group weren't people.

The woman--Bart; a strange name for a strange lady--took a long pull on her cola, the straw crackling and popping loudly while she maintained unbroken eye contact. She belched. "So?"

Todd lowered his head to the table, pushing his untouched salad away from him. He wondered what it would feel like to scoop his brain out through his eye sockets. 

"Bart?" Farah called without looking away from the bloody steak she was busy cutting into. She pointed vaguely in the direction of the machete. "Off."

Bart briefly hesitated before slipping the machete from the table, stabbing it into the bench space between herself and Vogle with the ripping pop of punctured vinyl. Unlike with Todd, she made no attempt to establish a challenge through eye contact. 

Todd turned his head to whisper, "Why does she only listen to you?" 

Farah lifted a piece of steak to her lips and said smoothly, "Because I have _many_ knives." 

She did indeed, but that still made absolutely no sense. Todd felt like there was a story there, but he already had enough of a headache for one day, thank you. So he let it go.

Todd recognized Bart. It was kind of hard to forget the face of the woman that had inadvertently saved his life before attempting to speed along his dying friend. At the time she had been just another random player in a game that Todd had never been given the instruction booklet to, popping in and out of the chaos so quickly that he hadn't even had the time to question what was going on. Todd didn't think that she recognized him, though. He wasn't sure whether that was a good thing or not, since she seemed content with attacking acquaintances and strangers alike. 

While Todd was cautious where the wild-haired woman was concerned, and Farah seemed to have a firm but wary control over her, neither Vogle nor Amanda appeared to be worried that Bart would suddenly explode and get swingy with her machete.

After Vogle had announced that the trail he was on ended with Bart, he had practically become attached to her side. The idea of their manic and homicidal energies mixing and feeding off one another was terrifying.

Amanda was drawn to Bart like an impulsive moth to an equally-impulsive flame, and was fully prepared to let her tendency to fly off on murder sprees go because she seemed to be "a pretty rocking chick".

Todd was convinced that Amanda was trying to give him a stress-induced migraine. What other goal could she have when she seemed to be trying to stare Bart into submission? While Todd would rather call her foolish, Amanda preferred "productive", because she was the only one that didn't want to dance around the subject that the others were avoiding for various reasons. 

Leaning across the table, she asked quietly, "Were you part of BLACKWING?" 

Vogle stiffened, Todd sat up, Farah subtly glanced around for eavesdroppers, and Bart raised her eyebrows. 

"S'that a bird?"

Everybody simultaneously wilted. Bart went back to her fries. 

Vogle shook his head. "That ain't the right question." At their confused looks, he shrugged. "We didn't know BLACKWING's name 'til Gripps overheard it once." After all, they hadn't exactly been willing guests--at least not when Vogle had been brought in--and who ever gave prisoners answers? It was easier to control them when they had little to no information on what was happening. There was a name that they had known, however. Kind of hard not to know it when they had been stripped of their given names and had this new one forced upon them. "They called me Project INCUBUS."

Bart leaned away from Vogle with wide eyes that, for the first time, completely lacked their usual predatory gleam. She gripped the edge of the table so tightly that her fingers bled white. "MARZANNA," she rasped. "I never met any others." But she knew of Project INCUBUS. There had been plans for her to work with them. They had never gotten so far as to make introductions. She distinctly remembered there being more than  _one_ in Project INCUBUS, though, which she only remembered because it had been so strange that there was a project with more than one person. She also remembered the heat that had pooled in her chest and pressed against the top of her skull, because why did other projects get to have people to talk to, while she was always left alone in that small, dark room with only herself for company?

She wasn't lonely now, though. Now she had people around her; people who she could talk to because the universe didn't want her to kill them yet. It was nice.

"They want us back," Vogle warned in a hushed voice, leg bouncing at a mile a minute beneath the table. His fight-or-flight response was trying to kick in, not that it was much help. There was nothing to fight, and he sure as hell couldn't fly. He settled for busying his hands by ripping apart salt packets, scattering the little white crystals on the table and getting a few jammed up beneath his fingernails. 

Bart cocked her head. "Oh, so that was  _their_ tank."

Todd, who had been downing cola in hopes the caffeine would cure his growing headache, choked on his straw, soda dribbling from his nose and starved tears dripping from his eyes. "A  _tank?"_ he squeaked. They were going after bastards that had the power and the funds to send  _tanks_ after people? He really should have expected that--it was the  _CIA,_ so duh, no shit--but he still hadn't really processed that they were going up against a secret military powerhouse. And what did they have? Well, Farah apparently had a lot of knives, Vogle could clock someone with a bat, and in a pinch, Todd and Amanda could probably wow some of them with their musical skills. 

"They sent a tank after you?" Amanda asked, ever excited by the things that made Todd want to fear-vomit. "How'd you get away from a _tank_?"

"I broke it."

"Oh, my god, that is so metal."

Bart frowned. "I think it was made of metal?" It had exploded like metal. The shrapnel had cut through some of the idiots with assault rifles the way metal usually did.

"Let me get this straight," Todd said, placing his hands flat on the tabletop. "BLACKWING sent a tank after you?"

"And fifty guys." Or, about fifty. "With guns."

"Oh. Okay. Does anybody else feel like they need to lie down?"

"I killed them all, though," Bart added. It didn't seem like she was trying to comfort Todd at all, more like she was just  _very flippantly_ stating an _extremely_   _macabre_ fact. 

Farah insisted that Bart straight-up murdering "fifty" guys was a good thing, although Todd couldn't see how that was so. She was very patient when explaining that them being dead meant that the CIA  _probably_ had no idea where Bart was, and therefore wouldn't have people tailing her that could report back that  _they_ had been located. Todd was less patient when explaining that sitting across from a serial killer was giving him anxiety. Farah assured him that Bart was not a serial killer, but instead a  _spree_ killer, seeing as she had been killing people without a substantial cooling-off period and was not putting much--if any--forethought into the murders. Todd did not feel reassured.

Bart didn't actually care about Todd's emotional state, her brow creasing as she noticed that something--or rather  _someone--_ was missing. "Where's your friend?" The table fell into a sullen silence, nobody wanting to meet her eyes. "Dirk Gently?" she offered, wondering if maybe they had forgotten their friend's name, although that didn't seem like something that friends really  _did._  Amanda fidgeted in her seat, Vogle moved onto the shredding the larger and more satisfying sugar packets, and Todd and Farah exchanged glances. "The guy that spoke British that I tried to kill?" Farah shot her a heated glare, her gaze like a knife straight to the thigh. Bart leaned back to put a bit of distance between them, unwilling to repeat that particular experience. "He's like me, you know. Well, not like me. But like me. He sees how things are connected, too, but I don't think the universe leads him to people that need to die." He was too...brightly-colored and shrieking for that. An insect would notice a squawking parrot coming towards it, but no insect would spot the silent owl. "He was part of the bird thing." She liked birds, but not this one.

"We know," Todd muttered. "They got him and Vogle's friends about a month ago. We've been trying to track them, but the only lead we've found led us to you." Which hadn't been the intention, obviously, and was more than a little it disappointing. Bart, however, had a look of refreshed interest, her eyes alert as she leaned forward on the table.

"You were led here." 

"Well, kind of. Vogle tracked you by your psychic scent or signature or...something." Trying to dissect his ability made Todd's brain hurt. A lot of things involving sort of-psychics did, now that he thought about it. 

Bart glanced around the table, nodded once to herself, and then pushed on Vogle's shoulder until he and Amanda slid from the booth and let her out. She pulled her machete with her, unconcerned when it dragged and ripped through a good half of the bench as it went. She took two steps away from the table, paused, turned back around to snatch her plate of unfinished fries from the table, and then promptly made her exit, a waitress practically throwing herself over the bar counter to get away from the dirty woman carrying a giant knife as if it was a purse. The bell hanging over the front door jingled ominously as she left, the delicate tinkling like a gong in the tense silence.

"That was so weird. She was  _so weird._ " Amanda grinned. "Did I already say that I like her? Because I like her."

Vogle looked dazed. " _The Rowdy 6,"_ he breathed.

"Jesus Christ. No. Nope." Todd didn't even want to  _think_ about that. His sister living with not only four chaotic men, but a homicidal woman as well? Adding Bart to the Rowdy 3 would be like adding C4 to a shipping container of railroad spikes. Oh, look at that, he was thinking about it anyway.

Farah released a slow, steady breath, gently placing her hands on the surface of the table with her fingers splayed. "We need to leave," she informed the group evenly. At their voiced questions as to why, she nodded towards the torn vinyl of the bench, the smears of blood that Bart had left behind, and the mound of salt, sugar, and shredded paper that Vogle had arranged into what appeared to be Mount Rainier. "Because I'm not paying for damages. Also, they called the cops, like, three minutes ago."

Farah actually  _did_ leave money for repairs, along with a sizable tip for the staff. Or maybe she just left the money in an attempt to pay them to keep their mouths shut. She hadn't been very clear on her intentions, but Todd felt like the way she had phrased them seemed a bit threatening.

They made a quick retreat to their car, piling in in hopes that they'd get out of town before the cops could get to the diner and arrest them for the plethora of laws that they had or currently were punching in the metaphorical gut. Vogle climbed in the back, intent on flipping over into the trunk to return to his blanket nest, but he froze, his mouth open and his eyebrows raised.

"Uh...huh." He blinked. "Those're mine."

"Well, I like them," Bart replied, snuggling down deeper into the cotton and the fleece. She stared at the gawking four over the edge of one of the blankets that she pulled up past her nose, just daring one of them to try and take them from her. Vogle looked prepared to, but one stern look from Farah had Bart handing over half of the blankets with a grumble. Vogle made himself busy rolling around until he was completely wrapped up in his share of the blankets before grinning.

"I'm like a burrito," he told Amanda with a sage nod of his head and a serious tone.

Todd decided to ignore that, mostly because he wasn't entirely sure what he was supposed to do with it. "What're you doing in here?" he asked Bart. "And how'd you know this one was ours? No, wait, don't answer that, lemme guess: The universe guided you. Just stick to the first question." 

The raggedy woman twirled a fry in the air before popping it into her mouth. "The universe guides me."

"Yeah, no, we got that already. That doesn't-"

"No, no, listen." She cocked her head, as if actually listening. "The universe talks. It has a plan. It arranges things to make stuff it wants to happen, happen. It connects things and makes a path to follow. I'm good at following that path." She paused to swallow, using the time to gesture broadly at the other occupants of the car. "That path led me to you. And the universe didn't let me kill you! The only times that happens is if something important is happening. Like with Dirk, and-" She frowned, her jaw tightening. "Well, your path led you to me, too. We're connected now." Connected  _again._ Or maybe they hadn't stopped being connected ever since this whole business with psychics and time travel and shady government jackasses had started.

"So, what? You're just going to stick with us?" Getting help didn't seem like a bad idea, especially from somebody that could take out a tank and at least fifty guys without much of an issue.

Bart nodded with a shrug. "Until the universe stops protecting you and lets me kill you, or I find whoever I'm supposed to be killing right now. Whichever comes first."

Todd decided that this definitely seemed like a piss-poor idea.

* * *

' _Get your hands off of him! I told you, I'm trying! Why won't you listen? Don't touch him! Let him go! Todd! TODD!'_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I have no idea if Bart is actually MARZANNA or not. Max Landis posted an image on twitter of the different projects, and some of them are highlighted different colors. INCUBUS, MARZANNA, and ICARUS are green; HERODIAS, LAMIA, BANSHEE, and BEL are orange; and MOLOCH is blue. I've interpreted that in a few ways: the green projects may have been the ones we've seen in season 1 and the others will come later, the colors might mean who has been recaptured/located/gone after, or the colors could be what their "alignment" is (green = good, orange = bad, blue = neutral). So I narrowed the possibilities down to either MOLOCH or MARZANNA for Bart, and since Marzanna is thought to be the goddess of death, I picked her. I might be way off though. If you guys have any theories for that image, I'd love to hear them.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Totally did not proofread this as much as I should have but it is 3:10 in the morning and I have a 10 AM class tomorrow. So. Enjoy my tired babble I guess?
> 
> I should stop writing exclusively past midnight.

 

_Why? Why are you letting them do this? Why are you_ helping  _them? Is this payback for my lying to you? Or because I couldn't protect you? I tried to get them to stop, but I can't do what they want me to. I can't do what_  you  _want me to. Why won't any of you listen? Them I understand, but_ you? _I tried to help you, I promise I did. This wasn't supposed to happen. My choices were supposed to keep you safe. Why didn't it work? Why are you_  doing this?'

* * *

Getting Bart to sit still for longer than five minutes was like trying to lasso a tornado of Brillo pads and bleach with a can of half-used silly string. In a word: Impossible. She was a maelstrom of impulsivity and murderous intent that quickly grew tired of the quaint little cabin that the group had retreated to for regrouping and restrategizing. 

She was a creature of habit, that habit being to live in her own reality, which wasn't actually a reality that anybody else lived in. The others found that the rules of her world were hard to understand, if they could make any sense of them at all.

She didn't eat or sleep like people usually did. If food was in her immediate line of sight, she'd eat it, but she wouldn't search it out from the cupboards on her own. She didn't generally sleep when the others did either, instead appearing to fall asleep at random, and in random places. It wasn't uncommon to find her propped up in an armchair or with her head on the kitchen table, dead to the world. Todd even found her lying face down in a pile of leaves once, which had caused him a bit of panic. "I eat and sleep when the universe wants me to," she explained when Amanda asked after that particular incident, acting as if her behavior was completely normal.

Todd hadn't thought that somebody following the "will of the universe" or whatever could confound him any more than with Dirk, but lo and behold, Bart had managed it.

Bart also had a particularly nasty habit of trying to kill Todd whenever she felt like it. It had become so common that he no longer reacted as violently as he had at the start, when Bart would pop up with one of the guns she had probably swiped from Farah or something equally as threatening. She never succeeded--thank god for the little things--because the universe was apparently not done protecting him yet.

"Just checking," she would say casually.

"Please get that knife away from me," he would respond.

Bart didn't once try to poke any of the others full of holes. She and Vogle seemed to naturally gravitate towards one another, their bond forged quickly in the agonizing heat of their shared pasts, and Amanda had apparently taken it upon herself to try and teach Bart what a hairbrush was; she was met with varying success. Bart was also enraptured by Amanda's musical talent, bursting into rasping peals of laughter at even the simplest roll on the countertop. 

The only person Bart didn't seem to be trying to develop a relationship with--in her own strange, backwards way--was Farah. She avoided the taller woman like a beaten dog, watching her with a wary eye whenever she was in the room. After another one of Bart's murder attempts, Todd decided that they were familiar enough with each other to ask why she was so hesitant to step out of line around Farah, because seriously, if a  _tank_ didn't faze her, then why did one person?

"She's weird."

"Vogle  _literally_ ate Jell-O out of the sink this morning."

"So?" Todd rubbed at his eyes, suddenly exhausted. Of _course_ that wasn't strange to the woman that had proudly explained the other day that just because there was fruit on a bottle, it did  _not_ mean that the contents were actually drinkable. "The universe didn't protect me from her. That never happened before."

Farah apparently thought that Bart's caution around her was hilarious. "If it keeps her from trying to kill us, then her fear is welcome."

"It's only protecting  _you,_ though."

"Point. You could always try stabbing her in the other leg."

"Wha- no, thanks, that sounds detrimental to my health."

One week into their hunt for a new lead, Bart swept into the living room like a typhoon, her hands twitching and hair sticking up like an irate cat. "There's no one to kill out here," she stated, bringing her hand to her mouth to chew on her nails. Todd's hope that Bart had given up on trying to kill him was instantly dashed when she threw a steak knife at him without even looking, the blade sinking into the armrest of the couch he sat on. "See? I need to leave. This isn't right."

"Leave?" Amanda parroted, perking up from where she and Vogle had been sitting across from each other on the floor, doing each other's hair. She frowned, looking hurt. "But I thought you were going to stick around until you killed who you needed to? Or Todd." Her brother shot her a glare, to which she shrugged. 

"The universe is protecting him still." She sounded disappointed. Todd tried not to be offended. "And I'm not going to find anybody to kill out  _here._ I don't like all this "sitting around" stuff. I'm not going to find my targets while sleeping and eating and thinking." The universe generally worked to bring her and her targets together, but she couldn't expect it to do  _all_ of the work. If it did that, then there would be no reason for her to even be alive, now would there? She didn't like the idea of not having a purpose; of being aimless. She preferred having a path and a light to guide her. Bart  _ne_ _ver_  wanted togo back to a dark, tight room where there wasn't enough space to have a reason to exist.

Vogle was suddenly on his feet, fingers wiggling at his sides. "Yeah!" he agreed. "We've been here for three months! All this thinkin' is stupid, and it ain't gonna find Martin and the others."

"We haven't been here for three months, Vogle," Farah said. "And we're not just  _thinking,_ we're coming up with a plan. We've been searching randomly for a month now, and it got us nowhere."

"It didn't get us "nowhere". We found Bart."

"That's not exactly the result that we had been hoping for, Amanda. Bart's was the only trail we've been able to pick up yet, which means we've got to switch up how we're doing this. We can't just keep driving around, hoping that we'll find something. We don't even know if Dirk and the Rowdy 3 are still in the state, let alone the country. They could have been flown out from Seattle the day they were captured for all we know. What we've got to do is hack into the security cameras at airports around the city and see if they caught anything. Amanda, you and Vogle said that you saw two of the agents that- ...Amanda?"

Amanda clearly wasn't listening, and she probably hadn't been for a while. Her face was blank except for a slight squinting of her eyes, her lips just barely parted. She didn't even appear to be breathing. 

"She broken?" Bart grunted.

"Amanda?" Todd asked gently, worrying that she was perhaps suffering from an attack. When that still got no response, he reached out a tentative hand to try and rouse her. His fingertips had barely brushed against the sleeve of her jacket when she shrieked, sending everybody but Vogle tumbling back. Todd's heart was gripped by panic, because shit, his sister  _had_ been in the middle of an episode, and he had touched her and set her off, had probably caused her pain, and  _shit he was such a terrible brother._

But Vogle wasn't moving to do anything, instead watching her patiently as she stood up quickly, hands flapping up and down in what looked like excitement. "Oh, my god, I think I figured it out!" she shouted. "Oh, I am so smart."

"Amanda, what the hell?!" Todd barked. "I thought you were having an attack!"

"Yeah, dude, a  _genius attack._ Check it out. Bart, your power is to hear the universe, right? Like, it brings you places and junk. What specifically does it do?"

Bart frowned. "The universe leads me to people that are meant to die, and then I kill them."

"And they're always bad people, right?"

"I don't care if they're bad. They're just supposed to die." She paused and cocked her head, her nose wrinkling as she thought. "But a lot of the people I kill did or were doing bad stuff." Even when it wasn't immediately obvious that they were doing something wrong. She had never thought about that, actually. Not that the idea of right and wrong made that much sense to her in the first place, but still. She at least understood on a basic level what other people deemed was acceptable or not. That was why she changed clothes as often as she did; being covered in blood-soaked clothing was not "appropriate for modern society" or whatever.

"So the universe leads you to bad people. How does it do that?"

She shrugged. "I walk and I find people that feel important. Sometimes I drive." Once she flew in a charter plane, but that situation took a nose dive the same time the plane did. Apparently, pilots  _were_ necessary, and flying a plane was harder than driving a car. Who would have thought?

"Then there you go," Amanda said proudly, a smug grin on her face. "We  _are_ just going to keep driving around hoping that we find something, because the people who took the Rowdy 3 and Dirk are a bunch of assholes, and Bart specializes in finding assholes. We follow her, and then Vogle can sniff out the others when we get close enough. How's  _that_ for a plan?"

"Wandering isn't really a plan-"

"It is when everything happens because the universe planned all this crap out already, and when two-fifths of the people in this room have superpowers." Amanda practically giggled in delight. "Who needs a 9-to-5? This is  _awesome."_ And to think that just a few months ago, she had been holed up in a house, fully prepared to trade anything she had just to make it out of the neighborhood and back in one piece.

Farah stared at Amanda, lips pursed in what was either thought or disapproval. She briefly turned her attention to the maps that she and Todd had been pouring over, each and every one covered in grids and scribbles and blocky profanity. Some were so thoroughly dyed with black and blue and red, she couldn't even tell what the maps were  _of,_ let alone what the individual thoughts scrawled on them were.

When they had so little information, it was easier to say that they were going to form a plan than to actually sit down and make one; obviously, considering the maps looked like they had been sneezed on by an ink factory. Their idea with the airport footage was already a desperate grasp at straws that she knew would most likely still leave them sinking. 

"Do you think you can find them?" Farah asked, directing the question at their local homicidal maniac. 

Bart shrugged. "Maybe. I dunno. Depends on if they're my target or not."

"But you're willing to try?"

"Yeah, sure, I guess." Especially if it got her out of the Cabin of Boredom, nestled in the Forest of Nothing. She trusted the universe to bring her to the next person she was supposed to kill, but it had never just had her sit in one place for so long. Adding that to it wanting her to actually  _protect_ somebody, the whole of creation sure was throwing her into a lot of situations that she wasn't familiar with. Maybe she would be better at leading the intuition-blind than she was at keeping people safe.

By the next day, the cabin was all but abandoned. They hid any unneeded identifying objects where they were not likely to be found by snooping CIA agents, should they find the cabin. Farah woke them all up early to wipe down just about every surface, not caring how ridiculous that surface was, because  _who knows, Todd, they might dust the ceiling fan for prints,_ and after that, they were gone.

They decided to take both Farah's car and the Rowdy van, which was mostly at Todd's request, because not only was Bart going to be driving the van to better follow her instinctual directions, but Vogle was insisting on riding with her. That seemed like one big, three-ton ball of metal and terror, so Todd checked the box marked " _hell no"_. He only tried for three hours to convince Amanda to ride with him and Farah; his sister was impressed by his restraint.

Amanda, Vogle, and Bart went into the trip with much more excitement than Farah or Todd. Bart and Vogle were familiar with a transient, chaotic lifestyle, and such a stagnant week had left them with an abundance of pent-up energy. It was remarkable that nothing had blown up. And Amanda could have practically been considered a psychic vampire herself, soaking up their exuberance like a happy, snarky little sponge. 

Two hours of nothing but Interstate 90 later, and the only one in the Rowdy van that hadn't had their enthusiasm drop kicked to Kansas was Bart. Vogle had passed out in the back after only an hour with nothing to keep himself entertained, and while Bart was thrilled at the idea of having a discussion partner, most of those conversations were short-lived and fueled by her lack of basic knowledge.

Amanda thought something would have happened already. The week following the arrival of Dirk Gently had seemed to fly by at a dizzying pace, and compared to that, two hours in a van with very little going on was like torture. Washington was pretty to look at and all, but it wasn't  _that_ pretty.

With the travel clock quickly approaching three hours, Amanda's patience ran out. "Okay, so I know you said that your power just involved you wandering and stuff, but how do you know when you get there? Like, that guy in the red truck looks super sketchy and killable. Maybe you're supposed to go to that truck stop?"

Bart glanced out the dusty passenger window. "Nope."

"You barely even looked."

"Because that's not where we're supposed to go."

"But how do you  _know?"_

"I just do." Bart paused to hook a hard right, nearly missing the off-ramp. Based on the squeal of tires and the short but agitated honk behind them, Farah  _had_ missed the turn. Bart didn't slow down to wait for her. "It's like...a feeling in my gut. It doesn't tell me where I'm going to end up, but when I get there, I know."

Finding the place where her gut would be happy and accepting was apparently harder than it looked, since ten minutes later, Amanda took note of the same park sign for the fourth time. A few minutes later, and the park sign drifted past them again. "What're we doing?" Amanda asked. 

"Waiting," Bart grunted, a light frown twisting the corners of her mouth downwards. Then, without warning, she slammed on the brakes, the wind leaving Amanda's lungs, and Vogle yelping from the back as he was thrown up against the backs of the front seats. Behind them, tires screamed, and a number of horns blared. The most worrying one was that of what was very clearly a semi truck.

Since Amanda had practically lived her life through a computer screen for the past few years, she was a bit familiar with the stopping time a semi truck required when going at their speed, which--after a quick glance in the side mirror--allowed her to quickly calculate that they were sat comfortably in the  _"oh shit"_ area of the stopping space. Amanda had just enough time to grab the appropriate handle and swear loudly before the semi truck swerved, missing them completely and wasting a perfectly good panic on her part.

A little blue sedan heading the opposite direction veered into their lane to avoid the thundering behemoth of a vehicle, and the front bumper slammed into the grill of the Rowdy van with just enough force to shove it backwards a few feet, avoiding the drifting trailer of the semi by mere inches. Unfortunately for the sedan, that put it far enough into the _"oh shit"_ zone for it to be clipped by the end of the trailer as it flailed by. The sedan flipped and skid away from the van, the driver side smashed inwards as if a tantruming toddler had gone to town on it with jackhammer the size of a ballistic warhead.

"JESUS CHRIST!" Amanda barked.

"D'we jus' die?" Vogle groaned.

"This is a nice van," Bart proclaimed. She pat the wheel. The engine growled and revved with pride.

Yes, a very nice van indeed. 

She put that very nice van into park and then slid from the driver's seat, throwing the door closed behind her with a loud bang that was drowned out by the wailing of distant sirens, the shouts of frightened pedestrians, and the honks of impatient motorists that didn't care about the traffic jam's chaotic epicenter.

"Bart, where are you going?" Amanda called through her open window. Bart didn't answer, instead approaching the flipped sedan in a type of lazy, fluid stagger that should have looked drunken or ridiculous; with the crazy-haired woman, it just looked plain dangerous. She ducked down, crawling in through the smashed back windshield without a second of hesitation. She rolled along the ceiling, up towards the front seat, and only stopped when the driver came into view.

The driver of the sedan was a middle-aged man, his hair just starting to grey at the temples, with the kind of face that was forgettable even while staring directly at it. The forgettable-faced man was out cold and hanging from his seat belt, the clip mangled at his side. His face was coated with blood that dripped from a cut on his chin and his cheek, and his shirt was ruined by the amount leaking from a glass shard lodged in his side. Evidently, he was healthy enough to be waking up already, and when he did, his eyes immediately fell on Bart, who lay almost directly beneath him with an indifferent expression. His eyes widened, a look of surprise and terror on his face, and his jaw dropped open. All that he managed was a whistling squeak.

"Sup," she intoned, before bracing her elbows on the floor and kicking upwards with the sole of her foot. Her shoe slammed into the side of the man's head. Once, twice, and then his head snapped sideways with a crack, and he fell slack against his seat belt again. She waited for just a second, frozen like a buffering video, and then blinked. "Okay." That done, she rolled back out of the flipped sedan, unperturbed by the man's blood that had soaked into the back and side of her shirt. She nearly ran right into Amanda, who jumped back when Bart popped up like a grungy, homicidal whack-a-mole.

"Hi. Did you just kill that guy?"

"Yep. The universe-"

"-wanted you to, yeah, I know. Yeah! Yeah. We've gotta run." Amanda latched onto Bart's wrist and dragged her back towards the Rowdy van and pushed her in the direction of the passenger's side. Bart climbed in without an argument, twisting in her seat to stare at Vogle while he prodded at the bruise that had already blossomed on his forehead.  

"What happened to you?"

"Th' van b'trayed me. Traitor van. Traitor. Tater?"

Amanda glanced in the rear view mirror, just to make sure that Vogle's brains weren't spilling out of his head along with his babbled words. Was it possible for a psychic vampire to get a concussion? Probably. That was a stupid thought, actually. Vogle probably needed a hospital, or at the very least some back-alley clinic run by a doctor of ambiguous morality and dubious credentials. Maybe he'd have an eyepatch. Either way, Doctor Eyepatch wasn't actually an option. The best--and only--option they had was Doctor Ice Pack, which was in the first aid kit in Farah's car. Vogle would probably be fine until they met back up with them.

Amanda sat stiffly in the driver's seat, perched on the edge of the chair with her chin practically level with the wheel. Getting out of the traffic jam wasn't that big of an issue, because other cars scrambled to get out of the way of the hulking monstrosity that was the Rowdy van, and she was able to go slow enough to hold onto shaky confidence. But once the road opened back up and she was able to get over fifteen miles an hour, that was when her heartbeat skyrocketed, and her palms became almost too sweaty to grip the wheel.

Amanda's pararibulitis had popped up at the beginning of her junior year of high school, when she was sixteen. She had been young, living in a city with ready access to public transportation, and parents that were more than willing to drive her places. It wasn't like out in the country, where it was a half hour drive to the nearest store; if she had somewhere she wanted to go, she could get there. She had never deemed getting her driver's license important, so by the time her brain had freaked out and lost the plot, she had only driven her father's Buick a handful of times. She had given up on learning after developing pararibulitis, too terrified that she would have an attack while driving and end up hurting herself or someone else. Her experience with driving was an amalgam of her half-decayed memories from eleven years ago and the few times she had succumbed to boredom and played around on an online simulator, both of which combined into a grotesque blob of vague panic and confusion.

Amanda prayed to every god or goddess she knew the name of, begging that she not screw up or have an attack while behind the wheel. One of those deities must have been listening, because after seven tense, vomit-inducing minutes, she pulled into the parking lot of a dingy, dilapidated Shell gas station. The "S" was burnt out and sat at an odd angle, so the sign appeared to read "HELL". How apropos.

Farah's SUV was already there, pulled around the side of the building and near the dumpster. Farah and Todd jumped out the moment the Rowdy van rumbled up besides them.

"Shit. Play it cool. Nobody tell my brother what happened." Amanda rolled down her window with a wide smile on her face. "Hello, dearest brother, how might you be?" Shit. That was terrible.

"You're driving," Todd observed needlessly. "You don't have a license."

"Uh, call me crazy, but I doubt Bart does, either." Todd leaned sideways to look at Bart, who rolled her shoulders in a noncommittal shrug.

"Jus' a license t' KILL!" Vogle popped up between the two front seats, his entire forehead looking like some Jackson Pollock painting that had been recreated by a geriatric, blind dog with an attitude problem.

Amanda whipped around. "You're licensed to  _shut the hell up,"_ she hissed, swatting at the wild-haired man to try and get him away from the window. She turned back to her brother, turning the sickeningly sweet smile up to eleven. "Driving without a license is low on the list of stuff we're doing right now, anyway."

"Yeah but you haven't actually driven in over a decade, so it's making me nervous. What happened to Vogle? He's acting weird. Weird _er._ "

"No, that's just Vogle."

Vogle moved like he  _thought_ he was smoothly sliding between the seats again, but in reality he flopped forwards like a dead fish, nearly slamming his head into the radio. He pat the dashboard fondly. "Hateful potato. Ripped m' face off an' threw it in th' dumpster. Hater tater." 

Nobody quite knew how to follow that up. Farah wordlessly went to the trunk of her SUV and brought back an ice pack, smacking it across her knee a few times before handing it over to Amanda, who took it gratefully. "Vogle doesn't wear a seat belt?" she offered. It wasn't a lie, so she didn't feel guilty about it. "And Bart and I were just switching," Amanda added, reaching around to undo her seat belt.

"We are?" Bart questioned, but went about unbuckling herself and hopping out of the passenger seat. When she rounded the front of the van and prepared to hop back in, Todd made a strangled noise. 

"What the hell happened?!" He was, of course, speaking about the blood dying Bart's shirt, which was well on its way to drying. Amanda had forgotten about that. Shit.

"Okay, dude, don't freak out," Amanda began, holding her hands up in an attempt to placate her brother, who looked ready to blow a blood vessel. "But we may have caused a big accident that was, like, the  _coolest_ rendition of dominoes I have ever seen in my entire life." She broke off to glance at Bart's blood-stained shirt. "Oh, and Bart killed a guy." 

Todd was less concerned about Bart killing a guy than he should have been. Then again, he already knew that she was a spree killer, and while saying he was accepting of that fact was stretching it, he could at least comfortably say that he wasn't horrified. Maybe that thought alone should horrify him.

No, what he was more concerned about was the fact that they had caused an accident. He didn't even want to know what his sister classified as "big". And if they caused the accident and left--which they definitely did--that meant that the police were most likely searching for their  _very identifiable_ van; a van with two fugitives in it. Actually, they were probably  _all_ considered fugitives by now, so make that  _three_ fugitives. They had to get back on the road again as soon as possible.

Todd turned to Farah, wondering if she had drawn the same conclusion as him. It was obvious she hadn't, but only because she hadn't been listening. Instead, she had been carefully peeling a scrap of paper from where it had practically been glued to Bart's back by congealed blood. She was staring at that scrap intently, her bottom lip caught between her teeth as she focused on not tearing the damp paper. 

"What's that?" Todd asked once she had gotten it away from Bart's shirt, moving closer to peer over her shoulder at it. His shoulders stiffened. "Oh." His eyes widened. "Oh  _shit."_

"Bart? Where'd you get this?" Farah asked, her eyes not leaving the paper. 

Bart shrugged. "I dunno," she supplied helpfully. "Probably the car of that guy I killed." There  _had_ been a number of papers strewn about, spilling out of a briefcase that had gotten its locking latch smashed in the accident. 

"Did you grab any others?" That was a stupid question, which Farah realized immediately and shook her head. "Okay. Okay, the police will have gotten to the scene by now. They'll most likely gather up the papers and bring them back to the local police department, and they'll probably be gone by tomorrow morning. So, we've just got to break in to the police department and get to them before then. They'll probably be under some pretty serious security. We'll have to find a way around that."

"I don't get it. What's the paper say?" Amanda asked, already holding out an expectant hand. Her lip curled at the foreign, sticky blood that coated her fingers when it was handed over, but that expression of disgust turned into one of shock and minor panic when she read the paper. "Oh."

The paper was hard to read, torn and soaked as it was. But enough was legible to read "Project: MARZANNA" at the top in big, damning letters, underneath which was a number of aliases, and two pictures; one of Bart, just  _much_ younger and less bedraggled, and another of the homicidal woman, clad in the outfit that they had found her in. Beneath that, right before the paper became too red and wet and frayed, were the words "LAST KNOWN LOCATION", the following words cut off by blood.

"Son of a..."

Bart had murdered a CIA agent; one that had files on BLACKWING.  _Shit._

* * *

' _I thought you were my friend.'_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lemme know what you guys thought of this chapter! ALSO! A few of you have been asking where Ken and Rapunzel are at. There's a hint in chapter 3, and one (MAYBE two. I can't remember. Shit.) in this one. They're subtle. A bit more (less subtle) hinting will take place next chapter, so y'all can look forward to that! There's a few reveals for fallout from things that happened in season 1 that I plan on doing over the next few chapters, too.
> 
> ALSO ALSO. Quick show of hands! Who's totally lost on what's happening to Dirk right now? Do any of you have any theories? I'd love to hear them! (If you're confused: GOOD. If you're not: god dammit)


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What's this? Another update after only four days?! Does this mean that the quality was murdered and thrown in a ditch?! I dunno probably. OR it could just be because I cut this chapter in half to try and keep the chapter lengths similar to one another because otherwise this chapter would have been a BEAST and, like, triple the length of every other chapter.

 

 

_'That's not my name anymore. Stop calling me that. My name is Dirk Gently. That's the one I chose for myself. I know what you're trying to do, but it's not going to work. You can't just erase who I am and replace it with what you want. I'm not Icarus anymore. I'm not Svlad Cjelli anymore. My name is Dirk Gently.'_  

* * *

 The Rowdy van was a beast.

It was a hulking behemoth of metal, paint, and various weaponry. It looked like somebody had ripped it right out of a post-apocalyptic B-Rate that had been directed by a toddler with only a rudimentary grasp on how cars or apocalypses worked. It was old, it was loud, and its undercarriage was probably more rust than anything else, but it still looked like it could get into a fight with a freighter and win. With the sheer amount of crap piled up on top of it and the smell that was detectable from ten paces, it was obviously something that multiple people were living out of. It looked like a travesty on wheels but sounded like a lion. It was a beast through and through.

And that was why they decided to  _not_ use the Rowdy van to loiter by the police department that was two blocks down from a middle school.

Todd had offhandedly suggested that they just paint the van--maybe slap some logo on the side to make it look more official--but Vogle had been staunchly against that, to the point that he challenged anybody that tried to a fistfight. Nobody wanted to punch an invalid, though, so they pretended like his argument was sound. They left the van at the Shell station, which was looking to be abandoned more and more by the second.

Farah's SUV was much more discrete. It was one that had belonged to the Spring security detail, so it looked more like a government vehicle than one that should have been owned by a civilian. That afforded them a certain amount of anonymity; nobody wanted to mess around with people that might have been government agents. If only the car was all they needed in order to get in and out of the police department.

Vogle insisted that all they needed  _was_ the car, as ramming through the wall and just taking the files was an option. Farah insisted that Vogle had a concussion, was not thinking straight, and that that was a terrible plan. Bart's idea--to let her slaughter everybody between her and what they wanted--was an even worse plan, and she hadn't even needed to get whacked over the head to think of it.

It was a bit of a chore to get everybody on board with her plan to steal from the government to begin with. "Does it really matter if some CIA cronies come and get whatever papers are left?" Amanda had asked. "We got the paper that Bart's stuff was on, didn't we? They can't find us, right?"

"They've most likely got other copies of Bart's file elsewhere, so it doesn't matter. I wouldn't care about other agents collecting the files under other circumstances, but the agent Bart killed may have had information on where Dirk and the Rowdy 3 are being held. We might not get another chance like this."

Waiting until after dark in an at-capacity SUV wasn't fun. It was only a few hours, but for Todd specifically, it felt like an eternity. If normal Vogle was loud and full of energy, a concussed Vogle was even more so. He hardly sat still, deciding instead that each individual thing in the SUV was deserving of his attention and needed to be investigated. It had been amusing enough at first; until he had found Farah's stash of road flares, and had almost lit one right there in the cabin. Amanda had thought that it was hilarious. Todd had not.

Bart was, surprisingly, the least of a handful out the three, although that wasn't saying much. She had found a stack of old personnel files under the box of road flares, and decided that burning them was a good way to spend her time. Todd had tried to get her to stop exactly once, but had given up after she had threatened him with a knife. Really, though, as long as she was being quiet and just using her Zippo to slowly singe the papers until they were illegible, Todd was content with cracking a window and leaving her to her own devices.

When Farah announced that it was late enough in the night for them to get to work, it was nearing two in the morning. "You all wait here," she instructed, eyes trained on the building like a hawk staring down a field mouse. "I'll be quicker in and out on my own." Todd, who hadn't wanted to break into a police department in the first place, had been completely okay with that. Amanda had been a little bummed--"How often do you get the chance to rob the cops?"--but had given up once Vogle said that he was going if she was. She liked him and all, but she knew that him getting in and out of the precinct without drawing attention was not something he could do.

Bart was the only one with a problem letting Farah go on her own. When Farah got out of the SUV, Bart did too, hurriedly cramming her half-burned papers into her pockets. "I'm coming with you," she rasped around the lighter gripped in her teeth. Farah raised her eyebrows.

"Why?" Bart shrugged. "Okay. Well. No killing any cops. Got it?" Bart grumbled under her breath. " _Bart?"_

"Yeah, yeah, whatever."

Just to be safe, Farah checked to make sure that Bart left any feasible weapon in the SUV. She let her keep her lighter though, because she doubted Bart could kill anybody with just that.

Breaking into the police department went better than Farah had expected. Bart turned out to be surprisingly adept at pickpocketing, swiping a pair of handcuffs off of a passing officer while she crouched in the bushes near the door. Bart hadn't been too thrilled when Farah had explained her plans for the handcuffs, but had relented after Farah pointed out that it was the only way to get them both inside, and that if she was unhappy with it, she was more than welcome to go back to the SUV.

Three minutes later, Farah was frogmarching Bart through the department's garage, straight towards the door into the building's basement. The two cops that were exiting the building, their eyes clouded by exhaustion and faces light with relief at another finished shift, paused when they saw the leather-clad woman forcing the dirtier and wild-eyed woman forward.

"Can you hold the door?" Farah called ahead to the two officers, who exchanged glances.

"Who're you, then?" the older of the two asked, eyes alight with suspicion.

"Bounty hunter," Farah lied smoothly. "Coming to turn this one in. She's wanted in two states for vandalism, robbery, public indecency, and suspected murder." 

Bart snorted and rolled her eyes. "S'not murder if they were meant to die," she scoffed. That hadn't been part of the plan, and Farah didn't think that Bart actually meant to help, but the cops exchanged another look, this time the glance filled with understanding and mild apprehension.

"You got credentials?"

"Of course I do." Farah tightened her grip on Bart's shoulder, digging her middle finger into the soft muscle near the suprascapular nerve in a move that would have made any respectable Vulcan proud. Bart jerked violently at the unexpected jolt of electricity that raced up and down the right side of her body, which Farah turned into a rough shake. "But as you can see, I've kind of got my hands full. Now, do you mind?" She asked, nodding to the door.

Once the door swung shut behind them, Farah quickly slipped the handcuffs from Bart's wrists with an apology. The other woman wasted no time putting a few feet of distance between them, a glare creasing her forehead. "The universe needs to stop liking you so much," she grumbled. 

"File a complaint later, find evidence lockup now."

Finding the evidence room wasn't as difficult as Farah had been fearing. The labyrinthine basement had been designed with newcomers in mind, with signs at every corner to point rookies--and thieving fugitives--in the right direction. Navigating the winding and confusing hallways wasn't an issue, but the heavy metal fire doors blocking the hall that held the morgue and the evidence room definitely  _was._

Bart was ready to just walk through them, but Farah grabbed her arm and pulled her back before she could push on the bar. "Those doors are hooked into the security system," she hissed, jabbing a finger towards the card reader on the wall. "If we start pulling on that door, an alarm will go off, and everybody in the building will come running." Bart didn't look impressed or at all concerned about that, but she raised her hands in the air in surrender, and slipped back behind the corner they were using for cover. "Maybe if we introduce an electric charge of some sort...no, they've probably got something to detect abnormal power surges, and there's no guarantee shorting that thing out will unlock the doors. Maybe I could rewire it?" But no, that wouldn't work either. The security camera they were hiding under rotated slowly to scan all of the halls, but it was still too fast for her to try dismantling anything. And again, she had no idea if the card reader would alert anybody to it being tampered with. "Bart, you're good with lifting things. Do you think you could steal somebody's card?"

Bart didn't get a chance to answer, for at that exact moment, a high-pitched beep echoed and the fire doors swung open, a man in a white lab coat shuffling out with an empty coffee mug in one hand, and a clipboard in the other. Bart stiffened next to her, her fingers digging into her thighs and a sneer curling her upper lip. She looked ready to dart out and tackle the man, but Farah flicked her in the side, and Bart obeyed the silent command. The man passed by without glancing up from the clipboard, mumbling tiredly to himself as he went.

The moment the man was far enough away, Farah slid out from around the corner and quickly tiptoed to the fire door, which was taking its grand old time swinging shut on hinges that squealed loudly from age. She caught it right before it could click shut again, glancing over her shoulder apprehensively to see if the man would notice anything was wrong. He didn't, and Farah released a sigh of relief while waving Bart over.

Farah dug around in her pockets for one of the many bobby pins she carried and eased the door closed, making sure that the bobby pin was pinned between the latch bolt and the strike plate. Exit secured, she turned her attention to Bart, who had wandered off down the hall. To the left was a pair of double doors that were propped open, leading to a pristine morgue that seemed a bit undersized for the city they were in. Bart was standing over the exam table, sheet pulled back from the body laid out on it. She was poking at the scratched face of a middle-aged man whose neck was oddly wrinkled, as if the skin had been stretched too far. Farah didn't have to think too hard to guess who the man was.

"This place is weird," Bart said, continuing to poke the man's blank face while a frown adorned her own. "S'full of dead people."

"Well, it _is_  a morgue."

"A what?"

"It's where they keep dead bodies."

Bart made a face as she returned to Farah's side, her lips pulling back from her teeth. "An entire room just to store dead people? That's weird."

Farah jogged down the hall towards the other door, Bart drifting along behind her. "People can't just leave dead bodies in the street."

"I do."

Point taken. " _Normal_ people, Bart." People that weren't psychic spree killers.

Because the only door leading into the hall was locked and alarmed on both sides, the evidence room's door was protected by a simple tumbler lock. After the whole fiasco with being locked in a kennel and needing to dismantle her bra just to escape, Farah had invested in a ring of bump keys. Using one of those was a lot faster than cannibalizing articles of clothing and trying to arrange each individual locking pin. Three raps on the back of the key and the lock turned.

When Farah was younger, her grandmother used to tell her that one could gauge the cleanliness of a house by the state of the bathroom. That statement was usually followed by Farah spending the day deep-cleaning the bathrooms in the house, but the message stayed with her over the decades. It wasn't the exact same situation that Farah found herself in, but she felt like that mentality could be altered to apply anyway. In this case, she could gauge the amount of funding the police department had by the state of their evidence room.

That is to say, they probably had a yearly budget of three dollars and some pocket lint.

Farah had at least been expecting security cages of some kind, but what greeted her were a bunch of garage shelves that looked like they had been bought out of the bed of some guy's truck in the parking lot of a Golden Corral. The boxes of evidence were carefully labeled and arranged, but the heavy smell of rust, dust, and sweat took that one saving grace and punted it directly into the wall.

At least the organizational structure of the evidence room made some sort of sense. The box they were searching for was near the door, the basic case information written on the front in thick black marker. Farah pulled the box from the shelf and plopped it on the floor. She ripped the lid off and rifled through the contents, pushing aside trivial bags in search of the files. When she reached the bottom of the box and still hadn't found any manila folders, she felt her heart leap into her throat. 

"Shit," she hissed. She had assumed that the police would put the files in the evidence box until somebody could come to collect them, but maybe they hadn't? Maybe the files were sitting on the desk of the department's head. Or maybe they had missed their chance, and other agents had already come and gotten them. She dug through the box again, just to be sure. One bag caught her eye during the second pass through; one filled with partially burned pieces of paper. Farah ripped it from the box and, squinting through the soot and browned edges, read: "KNOWN ALIASES: Bart, Bartine Curlish". She released a slow breath. "You didn't tell me the car caught on fire."

"Didn't while we were there," Bart responded. "Why's it matter?"

"Why's it- Look at these, Bart! These are so burned and illegible, they might be useless now!"

Bart scuttled across the floor to her like a crab, craning her head sideways to peer at one of the scraps. She pointed to it. "'...the...'" She dropped her hand. "I can read it fine." Farah closed her eyes and started to count backwards from ten. "We got the files, let's go."

"We weren't going to physically take the files, Bart. We take the files, and the CIA would know that they're compromised. I was just going to scan the files onto my phone, but we don't have time to try and scan each of these scraps." Farah clenched her jaw in apprehension. "We either take them with us, risk getting caught to scan all of the pieces, or just leave them." Bart didn't look interested  _at all,_ so she probably wasn't going to be any help. Farah checked her phone; they had already been in the department for twenty minutes. She had hoped to have been out in half of that. 

Bart was staring intently at the bag of burnt paper, eyes narrowed as the gears visibly spun in her head. "So you don't want to take them because then people would know that we know? Just switch them out."

Farah rolled her eyes. "I don't suppose that you've got burnt paper in your- and she does," she cut herself off when Bart thrust a handful of crumpled, burnt paper beneath her nose. "Why did you bring that?"

Bart shrugged. "Hunch?"

Farah didn't have time to think too hard about that, so she just accepted it. She switched out the papers and, after a moment of hesitation, added in the torn piece of paper that had been stuck to Bart's back. That would add credibility to the faux files--probably--and it wasn't like the paper had any important information on it.

Farah put the box of evidence back up on the shelf, scrubbing the lid and sides with the sleeves of her jacket as she went. That done, she nodded to Bart and pulled the door open again. She immediately backpedaled, running into Bart and forcefully pushing her back into the evidence room. "Dammit!" The fire door at the other end of the hall was swinging open, the man in the lab coat striding back through it with a new alertness in his eyes. Behind him were two other men, dressed in identical suits, and Farah immediately pegged them as federal agents. She slapped a hand over Bart's mouth before the other woman could voice a complaint at being body checked, holding her breath and closing the door as slowly as she could. She left the door open just a crack, peering through to watch and pray and haggle with the gods so that the medical examiner and the two agents would decide that going to the evidence room wasn't something they wanted to do.

Her prayers were answered; the three men veering off to enter the morgue instead. Farah could have screamed in relief, and then she could have just screamed in general, because she realized that when the trio opened the fire door, they had dislodged her bobby pin.

The door had relocked behind them, and the alarm had rearmed.

They were trapped. 

Go figure.

* * *

_'I'm not Icarus. That's not my name. That's not...I'm not...Dirk Gently. My name is Dirk Gently. ...isn't it?'_


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god I'm so sorry this took so long.

_'I can do this. I lasted for five years before, I can last for five years again. I just have to wait. The universe will get me out. And when I escape again, I'll make sure that I really disappear. Nobody will ever find me again. Nobody.'_

* * *

The universe was a fickle being. 

It was changeable, sort of like the weather; in two words,  _wildly inconsistent._

Farah learned that when the universe decided to flip her the bird and get her and a homicidal maniac trapped in the basement of a police department while they were stealing top secret documents that belonged to the CIA. She had barely had enough time to curse their luck before the universe changed its mind, and the younger of the two agents that had gone into the morgue came rushing back out, his face bleeding green around the edges. He fumbled with the medical examiner's swipe card, nearly dropping it twice before he managed to pass it through the reader. The lock audibly snapped open just in time for the agent to bodily throw himself against it with such force that the door swung open and slammed against the opposite wall, the hinges clicking loudly in protest.

"S'wrong with him?" Bart asked. Farah shushed her.

From down the hall drifted the older agent's voice. "Sorry, he's a rookie. First day out in the field. Didn't mean for him to see something as upsetting as this so soon, you know?"

"I should be the one apologizing, Agent. I thought I had covered the body before I left, but I guess I was wrong."

Farah knew the medical examiner was right. She shot Bart a looked. "You didn't recover the body?" she hissed. Bart shrugged, looking unconcerned. 

"Who cares? The door's open."

The hinges on the doors to the morgue were the kinds that locked automatically if pushed too far. It was supposed to make it easier when transporting bodies, so that there didn't need to be another person there just to hold the door open for the body trolley. Such a function wasn't viewed as a detriment to proper security since the door needed to be pushed open wider and with greater force than usual, but the doors weren't designed with the current situation in mind. In any case, the young agent had body-checked the door right into the wall and gotten the door stuck open, and along with it, had given Farah and Bart an opportunity to escape.

Farah took it with just a moment of hesitation, dragging Bart along with her. She did her best to channel a mouse as they crept past the open door to the morgue, not daring to glance inside to see if the medical examiner or agent saw them. Their hushed discussion never faltered, and Farah and Bart made it through the security doors uncontested. Five minutes later, and the two were outside in the brisk air of an early Washington morning once again. Farah swore that she hadn't breathed their entire escape, but Bart looked invigorated more than anything else.

"That was fun! Shoulda let me kill the Coat and the guy in the suit, though."

"And cause more problems for us? I don't think so."

The three they had left behind in the van were ecstatic to see them--"Holy crap, you survived!" Yes, Amanda, thank you.--and Todd was even more excited to put the police department in their rearview mirror. He had spent the entire time that Farah and Bart were inside the building with his jaw clenched and his fingers curled around the steering wheel, just waiting for an alarm to go off and for cops out on patrol to swarm back to the building. If Farah and Bart had been caught, he hadn't known what he was supposed to do. He would have been lost, with his sister and a concussed psychic vampire as his only form of backup.

"How'd it go?" he asked after a moment. Farah held up a ziplock bag of burnt scraps of paper. "Oh. So it went well?"

"Arguably," the woman grumbled, ripping open the bag to rifle through its contents. She pulled out pieces at random, flipping them around and around in an attempt to find anything useful. Much of the bag was too burnt to find anything legible; just singular words or fragmented sentences that weren't very informative. A quarter of the way through the bag, she was annoyed. Halfway through, she was worried. When three quarters of the scraps were ruled out, she was in the middle of a bargain with the gods, promising more and more for just a shred of intel. She was in the middle of compiling a list of which organs she could probably do without when a slip of paper that was more burns and ash than actual writing caught her eye.

_BL...KWING Res...ch Base. Subject Containment. Project: HY.... AB.......KANSAS._ Below that was a string of numbers and letters that made no sense, but when Farah plugged them into the GPS on her phone, it revealed farmland in the middle of Kansas that looked like it had had a giant bite taken out of it by an 8-bit worm, leaving behind nothing but a blank expanse of black.  _That_  wasn't suspicious  _at all._

"Do you know what Dirk's name was?" Farah asked. Todd made a face that was halfway between a frown and whatever "you sicken me" looked like. "I mean his code name. Project name. Whatever. Like MARZANNA and INCUBUS."

Todd shook his head and said, "No. He never told me that." They had chatted a bit about Dirk's involvement with the CIA when they were driving back from retrieving the pieces of the time machine, but Dirk hadn't been  _that_  talkative about it. Mostly just, "Look out for these guys" and "The young one is awful and stupid". Todd hadn't even been fully convinced that what Dirk was saying was true until they had actually come and taken him. He had still been trying to wrap his mind around the "shark-in-a-kitten" thing. "Why?"

"There's a project name written on here," Farah explained. She held out the paper for Todd to see, but took it back before he could even take his eyes off of the road. "An H, and a Y. It  _might_  be him?" She didn't sound sure of that at all. Twisting in her seat, she called to the other two ex-BLACKWING subjects and said, "Do either of you know how many psychics were involved in this?"

Bart shrugged, while Vogle's head rolled awkwardly on his shoulders. He counted on his fingers. "At least six," he said happily. Amanda grinned with pride, because technically he wasn't wrong. 

"CERBERUS, ABADDON, CAIN, BANSHEE, ICARUS, WRAITH, and PYTHON," Bart suddenly blurted, her eyes clouded as she thought. "Only other names I remember."

"But there's probably more?" Bart nodded, and Farah sighed. Swell. And none of those had started with an H, which meant that there was at least seven different possibilities that they knew of for Dirk's assigned name. She flipped through the remaining papers to see if there was any more useful information. She wasn't surprised when there wasn't. She leaned back in her seat. "How do you all feel about Kansas?"

"'Cans are'," Bart corrected.

"What?" Farah asked.

"What?" Bart parroted.

This drive was going to be terrible.

* * *

Driving for three hours was boring. Driving for  _twenty-five_  hours should have been banned as unconstitutional on grounds of being cruel and unusual.

It was more like thirty hours, actually. They had to stop when Bart fell asleep at the wheel and nearly crashed into a guardrail. Everybody appreciated the rest, even if they were too on-edge to actually sleep soundly. Aside from Bart, who slept like a baby, both cars' occupants spent the five-hour pit stop tossing and turning and waking up at inconvenient and annoying intervals.

By the time they rolled through Russell Springs, only ten miles out from where Farah's phone claimed Kansas farmland gave way to the void, everyone was just the right amount of exhausted and jittery for impulsivity to rub its greedy little hands together as it prepared to make a big mess of things.

Surprisingly enough, Vogle wasn't so wild as to need a straitjacket or two to be still. He simply sat in the back of the Rowdy van, perched on the edge of his seat as if it might swallow him, silent as he stared unblinkingly at the opposite wall.

The group had stopped at a Walmart somewhere in Wyoming, and while there, Vogle had picked out a nice new weapon for himself; a metal bat, reinforced for die-hard baseball players and violent anarchists alike. He had wasted no time in christening it "The Riggins Wrecker"--scribbling as much along the barrel with a Sharpie--before taking it out for a test run on the car of some douche that had laughed at Amanda when she had started to have an episode in the parking lot. Nobody in their ragtag group tried very hard to stop the bat-wielding lunatic.

It was this bat that Vogle fiddled with as the Rowdy van jumped and jostled down the uneven country roads. He rolled the grip between his palms, and tapped out an erratic beat on the floor. It wasn't right, him being on his own. Sure, he had Amanda, and he had started to view the others as...something--not quite Rowdies, but, like,  _Rowdy-adjacent_ \--but the other Rowdies should have been there with him to take turns swinging the Riggins Wrecker into anything even marginally breakable. He had to make sure not to scratch it too badly, so that when he found the others, they could all wield it and leave their own marks on it.

As it turned out, Todd was the most impatient out of all of them. It had started right after they had crossed into Kansas with him lightly bouncing his left leg. His fidgeting progressed from there, spreading to his other leg before jumping limbs and making him drum his fingers on every surface within reach. 

Farah turned off onto a gravel road that wound away into a thick cluster of trees. Her phone chirped that their destination--a random waypoint a quarter-mile from their actual goal, since a GPS couldn't lead them to a place that didn't technically exist--was up a mile and then on their left.

After a moment of silence, Farah chirped in the same cheerful, matter-of-fact tone, "If you don't stop shaking the entire car, I'm going to encase your guitar in rubber cement."

Todd frowned. "That seems unnecessarily rude." He did his best to stop his restless fidgeting, anyway. He twisted in his seat, peering through the dust cloud Farah's SUV was kicking up to make sure the Rowdy van was still behind them.

As if hearing his doubts, the van's headlights sliced through the dust like the eyes of a wildcat, and the engine gave a muffled snarl. That stupid thing wasn't subtle  _at all_. Any guards could probably hear the van coming for miles.

Farah must have had a similar thought, because she pulled off the gravel path the moment the ground leveled out enough for her to wedge the two vehicles through the trees. She put as much foliage between the road and the two cars as she could before deeming their position good enough with a shrug of her shoulders and a twist of the ignition. 

"We walk from here," she declared as she hopped from the SUV. She circled around the back and beckoned for Todd to follow, leading him to the trunk, which she threw open. She rummaged through the random odds and ends that had accumulated there during their game of espionage tag with the CIA, tossing most of it over and into the back seat to be sorted later. She reached up beneath the floor mat, felt around blindly for a moment, and then yanked up the floor on a pair of discrete hinges.

"What the hell, Farah? Do you just have armories hidden everywhere?!" Todd cried, because the boot of normal people's cars had spare tires hidden in them, not enough artillery to overthrow small governments. 

"Do you really want me to answer that?"

"Yes!"

"Well, too bad," Farah said breezily as she pulled something that looked awfully lethal out of the trunk. She gazed at it with an appraising eye, before placing it back in its spot, only to pull out something that looked doubly lethal. "That mysteriousness is, like, seventy percent of my charm." 

Amanda bounced up before Todd could even  _begin_ to form a response. "So, what's the plan?" Her eyes drifted down to the weapon-filled boot, and her face exploded with the kind of giddiness usually reserved for tiny children on Christmas morning. "Holy shit! Nice!" She reached for a sniper rifle that was easily half her size, which Todd slapped her hand away from quickly. Farah held out a handgun behind his back without glancing up from the trunk. Amanda hurriedly snatched it up and slid it into the back waistband of her pants, all the while arguing with her brother that she _definitely_ needed that belt of grenades near the stash of sharper weaponry.

"Do you really think all of this is necessary?" Todd asked. Farah raised an eyebrow. "Right. Of course it is." His gaze roamed over the various options, nothing quite catching his eye until he spotted an arching bit of silver metal poking out from beneath an antistatic tarp. He pulled out the weapon with a snort. "I can't believe you actually kept this thing."

"I didn't have a crossbow yet," Farah responded with a shrug. "And it was ours, or  _yours,_ fair and square. Right of conquest, and all that."

"I don't know if that applies to weapons stolen from a body-swapping cult." Not like there was anybody around to try and contest that, though, and it was the only weapon out of the entire trunk that Todd even kind-of-sort-of knew how to operate, so he swung it onto his shoulder in a move that was supposed to be macho and impressive, but instead just resulted in him cracking the attached quiver against his skull.

"Okay, so here's the plan," Farah said with a firm voice. She turned to the others and frowned. "Where's Bart and Vogle?"

Todd spun around, eyes wide. He hadn't even heard them get out of the van.  

Amanda shrugged. "They got bored and left." She pointed in the vague direction of the gravel road. "Went that way."

"And you just let them?" Farah asked, disbelieving. Those two were like children; they needed constant supervision. If they hadn't already blown the entire operation and gotten themselves killed, Farah was going to strangle them herself. She marched off, eyes darting to her phone's GPS to try and take a more direct path than the road in hopes of heading them off. Todd and Amanda followed at a very purposeful shuffle.

"Why didn't you go with Vogle?" Todd inquired. The two were practically joined at the hip, after all. 

Amanda hummed innocently. "No reason." Todd raised an eyebrow. "What? Maybe I just wanted to spend some time with my bro." The other eyebrow moved to join the first. "Dude. The mistrust? Super hurtful."

The trio caught back up with Bart and Vogle a couple yards from where the trees gave way to a sprawling, flat chunk of farmland. At the end of the gravel road sat a little white farmhouse with a pastel roof and shutters, and a covered porch that wrapped around the entire ground floor. A little ways away from the farmhouse was an old barn that was listing just a tad to one side, most of the paint chipped away and faded from years of summer sunshine and unforgiving storms, the front doors sitting closed on crooked hinges. Beyond that was a pasture where perhaps two dozen cows milled about and grazed leisurely, not a care in the world aside from which patch of grass was the tastiest to munch on, and which was the coziest to nap on. The rest of the land was dominated by fields of crops, most of which was a massive cornfield that stretched around the farmhouse and barn to border it on three sides. 

Overall, it looked like a farm.

A normal, not creepy, not suspicious, been-in-this-family-for-twelve-generations  _farm._

Amanda threw her hands in the air. "Did we come all the way to Kansas just to raid some farmers?" she hissed. 

"Dunno. Let's see," Bart intoned, right before standing up from the bush Farah had shoved her behind, and strolling right out towards the farmhouse. Vogle trotted after her, pulling Amanda along with, and Todd followed while trying to awkwardly hide the crossbow behind his back, just in case it really was just a normal farm.

Farah pinched the bridge of her nose, rubbing at her eyes tiredly, because these people were less discrete than an air raid siren in a library, and they were most definitely going to die.

Bart, ever the most subtle of the group, stalked right up to the front door, kicked it in, and continued on into the dusty living room without losing even an ounce of momentum. She only stopped upon entering the kitchen because she walked face-first into an extensive spiderweb, which only fazed her because about half of it ended up in her mouth. She spat it out and brushed the multiple spiders from her arms with a disinterested flick of her wrist. "There ain't nobody here."

Everything was covered in spiderwebs and dust, and the decor looked as if it hadn't been updated since the '90s. A pot with brown sludge sat on the stove, and what looked like the beginnings of an abandoned dinner was laid out on the kitchen table, which definitely wasn't creepy _._ The same could be said for just about every room of the house, both upstairs and downstairs. One bathroom had a half-used tube of toothpaste on the counter, the cap still twisted off and a toothbrush left on the floor. A bedroom that clearly belonged to a child had a number of sun-bleached toys scattered around it, frozen in the middle of a game of make-believe. Another bedroom had an unmade bed and unfinished geometry homework on the desk, while a nightstand in the master bedroom had a book on it, laid face-down to save the reader's place. It was like the occupants had just up and left one day, dropping whatever they were doing, no matter what it was. It was all very post-apocalyptic and disconcerting. 

Farah checked her phone again, just to be sure, and yep, there was her location marker, right smack-dab in the middle of the void. 

"So, just checking, but we're all in agreement that this is creepy and not normal?" Amanda called, peering through the bars of a hamster cage in the child's room, where a tiny skeleton was curled up on the bottom of the plastic exercise wheel. She winced and turned to Vogle, who was looking around the room with an odd look on his face. "What is it?"

Vogle shrugged, crouching down to pick up a little Voltron action figure. "I think I had one 'a these as a kid," he said.

Amanda glanced around the room a final time, just to make sure there was nothing that could have been the hints of a CIA operation. But no, there was nothing. Just hand-drawn pictures of a young child, surrounded by swirls of color, some of which had tiny faces hidden within them; yellow had happy smiles, blue had frowns, orange's faces looked fearful, and red looked mad. The boy had blue and orange around him the most.

She turned back to Vogle, who had picked up the baby blanket from the tiny bed, and was rubbing it against his cheek with that same odd expression. "You ready to go?" she asked. He dropped the blanket and nodded. She took him by the hand and led him from the child's room and back down to the living room, where the rest of the group had gathered to report that the farmhouse hid nothing but disappointment and a  _lot_ of spiders.

Because of Bart's rather violent method of entry, the front door had been knocked mostly out of its place in the wall, and nobody had bothered to try to get it to stay closed behind them. When Farah opened the door in the kitchen to peer into the backyard, the two doors created a powerful cross draft that spiraled through the downstairs, kicking up dust and bringing in leaves from outside. 

It also brought in the _smells_ from outside, which carried a new scent that Vogle hadn't noticed on the approach to the farmhouse. The remaining Rowdy froze, his eyes widening and jaw dropping open. "D'ya smell that?" he asked. 

Amanda's nose wrinkled. "Dust? Rotted food?" Because yes, she definitely _did_ smell that, thanks. 

"I found a dead raccoon in the mudroom?" Todd offered. 

Vogle's head snapped around to Bart, who blinked at him with an otherwise blank expression. "What? I didn't kill it," she said.

Vogle shook his head. He was unable to keep the massive smile from spreading across his face, that bared his teeth in a feral grin. "Nah," he said. "I smell people like _us."_ And then he was off at a dead sprint, flying towards the barn with a whoop of joy and excitement, leaving the others to race after him.

* * *

_'You can't just...reboot me like a bloody computer. I'm a human. You can't do this. I'm a human.'_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, I'm so sorry it took this long. Life got in the way. Going to college and working full-time can be a real bitch, I tell you. But it is what it is, and chapter six is finally out! I've already gotten chapter seven outlined, so I hope it won't take too long to finish. Updates should become more regular once school starts up again. Hopefully this chapter was good enough to make up for the wait. 
> 
> Thanks for reading and sticking with me through that dumb hiatus, guys!


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